How an Off-Camera Flash Can Improve Your Golden Hour Portraits

When you think of lighting, you might think of splitting things between either natural light or artificial lights, but strobes can be a great way to balance out an exposure with varying levels of ambient light. This excellent video will show you how you can use a strobe or even just its modeling light to create great golden hour or nighttime portraits.

Coming to you from FJH Photography, this fantastic video will show you how he uses a flash to balance the exposure in a golden hour or nighttime portrait. The problem with something like a sunset portrait is that you will often want to put the sun behind your subject for the look, but then, with your subject backlit, you will have an unbalanced exposure. Exposing for your subject risks blowing out the sky, and exposing for the sky will leave them in shadow. And while modern sensors have impressive file latitude, if you want to avoid drastically adjusting the exposure on your subject and possibly degrading image quality, you need to light them to balance the overall exposure, which is where the strobe comes into play. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Hernandez.